AS KOBANI SIEGE CONTINUES, TURKS BOMB KURDS, OBAMA RULES OUT “GROUND GAME”, & IGNORES CALL FOR RESIDUAL IRAQ TROOPS

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The Kobani Slaughter: Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2014— In mid-September, the Islamic State terrorists launched a coordinated assault on the Kurdish enclave of Kobani in Syria, near the Turkish border.

ISIS: Can the West Win Without a Ground Game?: Jonathan Spyer, Tower, Oct., 2014— The United States and its allies have launched a military campaign whose stated goal is, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State (I.S., also known as ISIS or ISIL) established by Sunni jihadis in a contiguous land area stretching from western Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border.

Obama Ignores Leon Panetta’s Warning: Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, Oct. 6, 2014—Say this much about President Obama: He does not engender a lot of loyalty from his inner circle.

Ruins of the Middle East: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Oct. 14, 2014 — Obama’s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions…

               

On Topic Links

 

The Jewish Voices on Campus (Video): Youtube, Oct. 3, 2014

Should Turkey be Thrown out of NATO?: Alan Dershowitz, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 10, 2014

Did ISIS Use Chemical Weapons Against the Kurds in Kobani?: Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum, Oct. 12, 2014

To Defeat Islamic State, Remove Assad: John McCain & Lindsey Graham, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 2014                                

                   

THE KOBANI SLAUGHTER                                                        

Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2014

           

In mid-September, the Islamic State terrorists launched a coordinated assault on the Kurdish enclave of Kobani in Syria, near the Turkish border. As Islamic State rolled through 21 Kurdish villages, more than 45,000 people escaped across the frontier. By October, more than 180,000 Kurdish refugees were estimated to be in Turkey. Since that initial assault, Islamic State has been strangling the Kurdish forces defending the city. By Thursday, Islamic State fighters had reportedly seized more than a third of Kobani, although the US military said Kurdish forces appeared to be holding out.

 

The world stands by as Islamic State continues the ethnic-cleansing and mass murder that it has conducted across Syria and Iraq. But most shameful is the fact that the Turkish army has sat just across the border and watched the carnage in Kobani. When Kurdish protests broke out in Istanbul and across five provinces in Turkey on Tuesday, the police were swift to try to put them down, killing 21 protesters. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has engineered a dangerous game of blackmail, using the massacre of Kurds as collateral while warning that Kobani is about to fall. “We asked for three things: one, for a no-fly zone to be created; two, for a secure zone parallel to the region to be declared; and for the moderate opposition in Syria and Iraq to be trained and equipped,” Erdogan said on Tuesday. Ankara feels that Islamic State is dealing a death blow to Turkey’s traditional Kurdish enemies, and that it can use the humanitarian disaster to its benefit to pressure Washington to help get rid of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The idea is to use Kurdish suffering to get back at Assad. At the same time, Turkey is trying to get the US to do the job of defending its border. “Our government and our related institutions have emphasized to US officials the necessity of immediately ramping up air bombardment in a more active and efficient way,” Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan said last week.

 

The UN has also called on the international community to do more. “They [Kurds] have been defending themselves with great courage. But they are now very close to not being able to do so. They are fighting with normal weapons, whereas the ISIS has got tanks and mortars,” Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, said. The international community has greeted the ethnic- cleansing and mass murder by Islamic State over the last months with indifference. Mass murder of Shi’ite civilians became evident in July, as Islamic State terrorists proudly and routinely taped civilians they had rounded up digging mass graves and then filmed their gunmen slaughtering people. In Iraq in mid-August, the world watched as Yezidis were ethnically cleansed and slaughtered, and Islamic State fighters sold women. Although the US initiated a limited operation to evacuate survivors, little was done to stop Islamic State’s advance.

 

In September, attention turned to Syria’s Kurds. Although the US, France and UK did begin limited air strikes on Islamic State, the illusion that they would be effective has been burst with the siege of Kobani. Pentagon spokesman R.-Adm. John Kirby told Fox News on September 8 that Kobani was not a priority for air strikes. “ISIS wants this town, they want territory, you need willing partners on the ground,” he said. “We are in discussions the Turks about what they can or may do, we can’t make the decision for them.” Kirby added: “There is a limit to air power…. IS wants to hold ground…. Everyone is focused on Kobani and we understand, but we are taking away revenue [from Islamic State] and removing command and control nodes.” This statement illustrates that protecting civilian life is not a real goal of the US administration or its allies. The technical references to preventing revenue from reaching Islamic State shows that stopping ethnic-cleansing and mass murder is not on the international community’s agenda.

 

The tragedy unfolding in Kobani is unacceptable. Nations intone “Never again,” but we are watching a human catastrophe happen as Western powers fail to employ their massive resources. It is time for the world to wake up and do something to aid the Kurds in their battle with Islamic State before it is too late.

 

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ISIS: CAN THE WEST WIN WITHOUT A GROUND GAME?                              

Jonathan Spyer                                                                                                            

Tower, Oct. 2014

 

The United States and its allies have launched a military campaign whose stated goal is, in the words of President Barack Obama, to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State (I.S., also known as ISIS or ISIL) established by Sunni jihadis in a contiguous land area stretching from western Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border. As the aerial campaign begins in earnest, many observers are wondering what exactly its tactical and strategic objectives are, and how they will be achieved. A number of issues immediately arise.

 

Any state—even a provisional, slapdash, and fragile one like the jihadi entity now spreading across Iraq and Syria—cannot be “destroyed” from the air. At a certain point, forces on the ground will have to enter and replace the I.S. power. It is not yet clear who is to play this role—especially in the Islamic State’s heartland of Raqqa province in Syria. In Iraq, the national military and the Kurdish Pesh Merga are now having some successes at chipping away at the Islamic State’s outer holdings. The role of U.S. air support is crucial here. But the center of the Islamic State is not Iraq, and both the Iraqi forces and the Pesh Merga have made clear that they will not cross the border into Syria. This leaves a major question as to who is to perform this task, if the objectives outlined by President Obama are to be achieved.

 

The answer we have heard most often of late is that elements among the Syrian rebels will be vetted by the U.S., trained in cooperation with the Saudis, and then deployed as the force to destroy the IS on the ground. If this is indeed the plan, it is deeply problematic. The Syrian rebels are characterized by extreme disunity, questionable effectiveness, and the presence of hardline Sunni Islamist elements among their most committed units. There are certainly forces of an anti-jihadist ideology among them—the most well-known being the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, headed by Jamal Ma’arouf from the Jebel Zawiya area in northern Syria, and the smaller Harakat Hazm. Both movements have benefitted from Western aid in recent months.

 

The problem, however, is that these organizations are quite prepared to work with salafi groupings whose worldview is essentially identical to that of the I.S., even if their methods are somewhat different. Thus, if we observe the recent fighting between Assad’s forces and rebels in the Quneitra area along the border with the Israeli Golan Heights, it is clear that the main contribution to rebel achievements came from the Jabhat al-Nusra group, which constitutes the “official franchise” of the core al-Qaeda group in Syria.

 

Reliable sources confirm that Nusra cooperates with other rebel groups in southern Syria and has even been prepared to minimize its own role, so as to allow other groups to present achievements as their own to Western and Arab patrons and thus secure a continued flow of arms, benefiting all factions. What this means is that by championing these rebel elements as the ground force which will seek to enter and destroy a weakened I.S. in Raqqa province, the U.S. would be putting itself in the position of supporting one group of Sunni jihadis against another. In Iraq, while the Kurdish Pesh Merga cooperates de facto with Iran, their alliance is pragmatic and tactical, one that the Kurds would gladly break given the possibility of clear Western sponsorship. But the fierce condemnations in recent days (even by supposedly “pro-Western” rebel groups such as Hazm) of the U.S. bombing raids into Syria indicate that there is a deeper problem here. The alliance between these Sunni rebel groups and the salafis has a common anti-Western component to it. It is, in any case, not clear if these Sunni rebels will prove able to defeat the I.S., but even if they were to do so, the presence of radical anti-Western elements among them attests to the danger of a policy of support and sponsorship of them.

 

Of course, the Sunni jihadis are not the only dangerous players on the ground. Another possible, no less troubling, outcome of the air campaign against the Islamic State could be the return of Bashar al-Assad’s forces to eastern Syria, from which they have been largely expelled over the last year. It is not at all hard to imagine a scenario in which once the I.S. has been weakened by Western air attacks, the Syrian military and its Iranian-backed allies will be able to make gains. Indeed, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are already present in northern Iraq (and, of course, in Syria as well) and IRGC personnel have taken part in the fighting in Iraq in recent weeks. Qods force teams are reportedly located at Samarra, Baghdad, Karbala, and the former al-Sahra Air Base near Tikrit. Iran has deployed seven SU-25 ground attack aircraft which have played a role in offering air support to the Kurds and Iraqi special forces. Following intensive Western bombing, the possibility of the Islamic State eventually being sandwiched between pro-Iranian forces on either side before being destroyed would be a real one. This would achieve the desired goal of destroying the jihadi entity, but it could end up handing a major victory to the Assad regime and its Iranian backers—enemies of the West of significantly greater potency and seriousness than the Islamic State itself. Such a result would be somewhat reminiscent of the Iraq invasion of 2003, in which the destruction of the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein ended up largely helping Iran.

 

How does the West get out of this mess? The discussion about which ground force should be used to replace the Islamic State is itself confused by a much larger misunderstanding regarding the nature of the war now taking place in Iraq and in Syria (and periodically spilling over into Lebanon). The I.S. has now been depicted as the main problematic factor emerging from this conflict. But the Islamic State is in fact merely a particularly extreme and brutal manifestation of a broader process taking place in this area, in which political Islam of a Sunni variety is at war with the Shia political Islam of Iran and its proxies (especially Hezbollah and the Assad regime). The I.S. may promote a particularly lurid and repulsive version of Sunni political Islam, but in its beliefs and in its practices it does not represent some unique presence in the Syrian and Iraqi context. Rather, it is little more than a particularly virulent manifestation of a strain of politics and ideology which is the primary cause of the conflict taking place across the region. In the two scenarios discussed above, both quite plausible outcomes of a Western air campaign, the I.S. would be defeated and replaced by another version of Islamism—either that of its fellow Sunnis, or that of the rival Shi’ites…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

                                                                       

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OBAMA IGNORES LEON PANETTA’S WARNING                                              

Marc A. Thiessen                                                                                                           

Washington Post, Oct. 6, 2014

 

Say this much about President Obama: He does not engender a lot of loyalty from his inner circle. First Robert Gates published a memoir in which he declared that Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy [in Afghanistan], and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Then Hillary Rodham Clinton declared during the book tour for her memoir that Obama’s “failure” to arm and train Free Syrian Army rebels “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

 

Now comes Leon Panetta with a new memoir, “Worthy Fights,” in which he lays responsibility for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the rise of the Islamic State where it belongs — directly at Obama’s feet. Panetta writes that he warned Obama of the danger of withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq: “My fear, as I voiced to the President and others was that if the country split apart or slid back into the violence that we’d seen in the years immediately following the U.S. invasion, it could become a new haven for terrorists to plot attacks against the U.S.” But when he and Obama’s military commanders recommended keeping 24,000 troops, “the President’s team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated.” The White House, Panetta says, was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.” Now, “the ISIS offensive in 2014 greatly increases the risk that Iraq will become al-Qaeda’s next safe haven. That is exactly what it had in Afghanistan pre-9/11.”

 

Vice President Biden slammed Panetta for his “inappropriate” criticism, declaring he should have “at least give[n] the guy a chance to get out of office.” But it is precisely because Panetta did not wait until Obama left office that his criticism is appropriate. His book is not simply the latest contribution to the blame game over what went wrong in Iraq. It is a prescient warning about the future — because Obama is about to make the exact same mistake in Afghanistan. In May, Obama announced that he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, leaving only a tiny force to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. And last week, as the United States signed an agreement to extend the American presence beyond this year, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden reiterated that the administration had “no plans to change the plan the president announced” for a complete Afghan withdrawal by the end of 2016.

 

Well, if we withdraw all our troops from Afghanistan as we did in Iraq, then we will have the exact same result that we now have in Iraq. The terrorists will use the vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal to regroup, reconstitute themselves and reestablish the safe haven they lost in that country. Indeed, they will do so far more quickly in Afghanistan than they did in Iraq — because the Taliban is nowhere near as defeated in Afghanistan today as the Islamic State was when Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq. This will leave the United States with a far worse situation than before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Before 9/11, the terrorists had safe haven in one country. Now they will now have safe havens in three countries — Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. And that’s not counting Yemen (where al-Qaeda-linked militants just launched a rocket attack on our embassy and the government is near collapse) or Libya (where Islamists have taken over, forcing the United States to evacuate its embassy). The various terrorist factions will then fight for dominance in the jihadist world by competing to see who can be the first to attack us here at home.

 

This is why, instead of attacking Panetta, the White House should be listening to him. Panetta is a liberal Democrat, and at 76, his public life is largely behind him. He is not angling for the next job. If anything, it is an indictment of the administration that he felt the need to make his criticisms public — because Obama and his team apparently would not listen privately. They need to listen now — because if the president does not understand how the disaster he created in Iraq unfolded, he is destined to create a similar disaster in Afghanistan. And that would be a disaster for the United States.  

                                                                       

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RUINS OF THE MIDDLE EAST                                                                                      

Victor Davis Hanson                                                                                                      

National Review, Oct. 14, 2014

 

 Obama’s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions: (1) a special relationship with Turkey; (2) distancing the U.S. from Israel; (3) empathy for Islamist governments as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; (4) a sort of non-aggression agreement with Iran; (5) expecting his own multicultural fides to resonate in the region; (6) pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Let us examine what has followed. Obama’s special relationship with Recep Erdogan proved disastrous from the get-go, as Erdogan immediately began to provoke Israel and promote Islamist revolutionaries. Turkey today not only dislikes the U.S., but also poses an existential problem for the West. It is a NATO member that is antithetical to everything NATO stands for: the protection of human rights and constitutional government against the onslaught of aggressive totalitarian regimes. Turkey is now operating like the old Soviet Union in using murderous proxies to enhance its own stature; for example, it finds ISIS useful in whittling down the Kurds. As a rule of thumb, any enemy of Erdogan’s Turkey — Israel, the Kurds, Greek Cyprus, Greece, Egypt — is likely to be far more friendly to the U.S. and NATO than are other nations in the region. If Turkey were attacked by ISIS, Syria, Iran, or the Kurds, would Belgium or Greece send in its youth under NATO’s Article V?

 

What did ankle-biting Israel accomplish other than giving Hamas a green light to send rockets into the Jewish State in hopes that we might do something stupid like slow down scheduled arms shipments to Israel or shut down Ben Gurion Airport for a day? Israel has nothing to do with the slaughter in Libya or Syria or Iraq, but it is a constant reminder that the United States is indifferent to its friends while it courts its enemies. As Obama’s new policy against ISIS is shaping up, Iran is emerging as more of an ally in his eyes than is Israel. Our once-close relationship with Egypt is ruined. All that is left is U.S. foreign aid to Cairo, largely because we have no idea of how not to give a near-starving Egypt assistance. Obama, under the guidance of Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, gyrated from Mubarak to Morsi to el-Sisi, as the U.S. went loudly full circle, from disowning the pro-American kleptocrat to embracing the anti-American theocrat to humiliating the neutral autocrat.

 

Obama kept quiet when a million Iranian protesters hit the streets in 2009 to show their disgust with theocratic corruption. Apparently the American president thought the pro-American tendencies of the young protesters were proof of their inauthenticity. Or  perhaps he saw them as sort of neocon democracy-pushers who would ruin his own chances of using his multicultural gymnastics to partner with Teheran. Our serial deadlines for stopping uranium enrichment proved empty. Ending the tough sanctions has brought nothing but delight to the ayatollahs. In the view of Iraq and Syria, somehow the U.S. has become a de facto ally of the greatest enemy to peace in the region. Obama did not wish to stay in Iraq and work with the Sunni minority by pressuring the Maliki government. He threatened the Iranian puppet Assad and then backed off, and he ridiculed alike the dangers of the savage ISIS and the potential of the Free Syrian Army. Meanwhile, the U.S. is sort of bombing on and off to save the innocent and thereby helping the Iran–Assad–Hezbollah alliance.

 

In order to win over the Islamic street, Obama has tried almost everything to remind the Middle East that America is no longer run by a white male conservative from a Texas oil family. His multifaceted efforts have ranged from the fundamental to the ridiculous. The Al Arabiya interview, the Cairo Speech, the apology tour, the loud (but hypocritical) disparagement of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, the new euphemisms for jihadist terror, the multicultural trendy pronunciation of Talîban and Pâkistan, and references to his father’s religion and his own middle name resulted in American popularity ratings in many Middle Eastern countries lower than during the Bush administration. In the Middle East, the only thing worse than being unapologetically proud of past U.S. foreign policy is being obsequiously ashamed of it.

 

There were no Americans dying in Iraq when Barack Obama pulled the remaining troops out in order to win a reelection talking point. Iraq was a functioning state, saved by the successful U.S. surge. That’s why both Obama and Joe Biden praised the post-surge calm. When Obama bragged that he had ended the Iraq War (which was ended in early 2009) and then brought our troops home, he gave the Maliki government a green light to hound its Sunni enemies and reboot civil strife in Iraq, in a way that soon birthed ISIS. The same sort of Saigon 1975 scenario will follow in Kabul early next year, if Obama goes ahead with recalling all U.S. peacekeepers from Afghanistan. In just two flippant decisions, the prophet Barack Obama sowed the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind that followed from perceptions of U.S. decline, foreign-policy indifference, and a new void in the Middle East.

 

At this late date, amid the ruins of the last half-century’s foreign policy from Libya and Egypt to Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the U.S. should hunker down and distance itself from its enemies and grow closer to its few remaining friends. We need to arm the Kurds, and help them to save what is left of Kurdish Syria. We should inform Erdogan that either he joins the fight against ISIS or we will welcome a large and autonomous Kurdistan and would prefer that Turkey leave NATO, as it should have long ago. We should forget the “peace process” and recognize that Hamas is an existential enemy of America and almost all our friends, and instead encourage an alignment of Egypt, the Kurds, Jordan, Israel, and a few of  the saner Gulf States against both ISIS and the new and soon-to-be-nuclear Iranian Axis…The present chaos of the Middle East was caused by our withdrawal from Iraq and a widespread sense that the U.S. had forfeited its old responsibilities and interests, and was either on the side of the Arab Spring Islamists or indifferent to those who opposed them. Tragically, while order may soon return, it is likely to be as a sort of Cold War standoff between a pro-Russian, pro-Chinese — and very nuclear – Iranian bloc, and a Sunni Mesopotamian wasteland masquerading as a caliphate, run by beheaders and fueled by petrodollars, with assistance from Turkey and freelancing Wahhabi royals from the Gulf.

 

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On Topic

The Jewish Voices on Campus (Video): Youtube, Oct. 3, 2014

Should Turkey be Thrown out of NATO?: Alan Dershowitz, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 10, 2014—Once again Turkey has proved to be America’s, and NATO’s, least reliable “ally.”

Did ISIS Use Chemical Weapons Against the Kurds in Kobani?: Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum, Oct. 12, 2014 —The fate of Kobani city now hangs in the balance, as around 9000 fighters of the Islamic State organization close in on the Kurdish held area.

To Defeat Islamic State, Remove Assad: John McCain & Lindsey Graham, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 2014—The airstrikes and other actions President Obama is taking against Islamic State deserve bipartisan support.

 

 

               

 

 

 

                      

                

 

 

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L’institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com